


You're my beautiful imperfection

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Emotions, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicidal Thoughts, M/M, Marriage, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-12 05:03:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15332376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: She knew when she married Abraxas Malfoy she married the name, not the man.





	You're my beautiful imperfection

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently, I like to write at 1am. Hope you enjoy this.

She knew when she married Abraxas Malfoy she married the name, not the man. 

She remembered how astonished she’d been by everything. She got a beautiful house, so many rooms always filled with light and flowers and people who would make her forget how lonely she was. It was eating away at her and had been for so long.  
She’d waited forever to leave her parents, to become her own woman but now she wandered empty halls at night staring at all the things she owned and knowing in her soul she was a poor woman.  
Abraxas wasn’t cruel, at least not intentionally. He did not see that holding her at arm’s length hurt, he did not see his silent hand rejecting her advances as callous, but she felt a part of her die a little more inside.  
They lay together at night, staring at the ceiling saying nothing. They never touched, never looked at one another, just lay waiting for some act of God to bring them together and no act of God ever came; only more silence.  
She sobbed in the mornings and the afternoons as she looked at herself in her expensive mirror. All the beauty in the world meant nothing to Abraxas. He didn’t even show her off. He brought her pretty things, dresses other people had recommended, jewels his mother admired, song-birds and flowers he saw in exclusive shops. But he didn’t kiss her. At least, not unless they were in public, then he held her, his arm around her waist and that look he reserved for his favourite people, the one that seemed to ache with love. She lived for those moments, despite how artificial they were, despite his false hands, despite the insincerities that stained his tongue. For those moments she was his world, she was his.  
So, she cried alone and then put herself together and smiled, smiled at all the strangers she filled her house with. She smiled at the house elves and she smiled at her parents and she smiled at her friends. She smiled at everyone, so no one would see the cracks in their world. She smiled so Abraxas could be happy in his delusion that they were happy. 

She could remember the first time she saw him. Tom Riddle. It had been when she was visiting the Malfoys for the first time. He’d been lying on the edge of the water fountain, reading. He’d sat up when she passed with the family. He hadn’t bowed his head, but his gaze was of interest, not spite. There was a gravity about him that had stuck in her mind long after they’d left. He would go on to be her husband’s best man. He’d looked at Abraxas like he meant the world and he looked at her with sadness, and then she knew: Abraxas had long sold his heart to someone else, someone who wasn’t polished glass, someone who was callous and raw and painfully intense.  
Tom had stayed with them, the ever-present apparition. He lurked in every hallway and in the halls. His smile coloured the dining room and his scent lingered in the library. It wasn’t sinister, it wasn’t ominous, Tom just felt like part of the house, a thing that could never be removed no matter how hard the rooms were polished or how strong the scent of the flowers was. He still permeated every inch of their house like a fungus. She came to accept he was part of Abraxas and she couldn’t marry one without acquiring the other.  
She’d never had a problem with Tom, he was charming and beautiful, a vision brought to life. She just wished Abraxas wouldn’t pretend, wouldn’t scurry about imagining she didn’t know what he did in his spare time. She knew he liked to think she didn’t know that he lay by the lake for hours on end, Tom’s head in his lap, talking about everything under the sun. Or that he disappeared in the evenings to share secret kisses in the chapel and secret touches in the spare bedrooms. She spied on them through the keyhole. Tom holding Abraxas so tight, as if he was the source of every heavenly gift known to man as if he was the key to a thousand secrets. She’d seen Abraxas’ smile as he held Tom just as tightly, leaving white fingerprints on his thighs and helpless kisses on his lips.  
Tom’s scent was all over him when he came back. She could feel the blue kisses on his neck and the impressions of Tom’s teeth and lips and fingers all over his body like an infection. A ghost hanging just behind Abraxas, reminding him of a time before his marriage. The time she suspected he was last happy when the glimmer of Tom was undetected when the traces he left behind stayed hidden from the world.  
They didn’t talk about it. They just lay in the familiar silence, two people brought together in holy matrimony, two people who had become one and somehow lost each other. Tom and Abraxas were one, and she was one with the lie they lived and were almost starting to believe. 

She remembered when she first kissed another man. His lips were soft, and his eyes looked like Tom’s. He tasted nice, familiar, she could almost pretend he was her husband. He ran his hands across her body like a lover should, taking his time to love. She’d felt so naked, so exposed as she lay with him, so open for him to see, to kiss, to touch and he had. Never shying from her, never pushing her body away only holding her closer.  
She’d felt dirty afterwards. Dirty and cold and more lost than ever. She felt like the hollow inside her would never be filled. She’d never seen him again.  
Her piano teacher was her next. His love had abandoned him to marry someone else, so they closed their eyes and pretended they were with who fate ordained them. They had taken kisses where they could find them and held hands in the late afternoon. Eventually, they didn’t close their eyes anymore. They came to understand they could momentarily end that loneliness, bodies on bodies late at night.  
She remembered when he left suddenly, to marry a girl he’d fallen in love with. She’d smiled and kissed his cheek and wished him all the luck in the world. Then she’d gone to the lake and cried until the sun set and she was alone in the dark. She shivered as she watched the stars, hands trembling as the cold wind whipped her hair and scattered ripples across the lake. She remembered a body standing beside her, Tom. He held her shoulder and she’d cried on his chest. He’d stroked her hair like she was a little girl. They’d sat together in the dark, two people who had nothing in common aside from a Malfoy and an inaccessible dream. They’d watched the stars and she felt a little less lonely. 

She remembered Tom leaving to travel Europe and that sad look in Abraxas’ eye as he looked across at her from the far end of the table, and for the first time, he’d moved closer. He looked into her eyes and seemed to find something new.  
They went on walks together in the afternoons, arm in arm looking as the leaves fell from the trees and clouds gathered in the sky. He learnt to reach for her hand at night, and she learnt to hold him tighter.  
They started to face each other in those lonely days. He’d confessed dark secrets he thought would make him so repulsive. Filthy, sordid secrets and dark appalling secrets. She’d held his shaking hands and searched for his face in the dark. She confessed sad secrets, vulnerable secrets that she felt made her weak. Late nights staring at gravel from the highest balcony and wondering whether death would quell her loneliness. He’d held her so close and whispered so many things to her, so many beautiful things.  
They didn’t love each other like a wife and her husband should, she knew that, but they loved in a way no one seemed to understand. He would hold her when she was scared, and she would hold him when the world seemed too much. 

She remembered the day that Tom had come back, and how that smile had changed, how shadows had grown like weeds through the cracks. She’d tried to hold her husband closer, but she couldn’t hold on to him forever. Abraxas had lost control of what he’d once loved. Tom had changed, twisted and warped just a little that he was no longer the Tom she’d once known. He would not hold her in the evenings or sit with her by the lake. He was colder, crueller, more remote, losing himself in a storm he’d created. He’d lost control and was being swept up in things he couldn’t understand. He was so much darker than before, a sickness hung around him and poisoned everything he touched. 

So, she smiled again, and Abraxas smiled with her. They taught their son to smile so no one would see the storm brewing, so no one would see the darkness that lurked beneath the surface and would one day consume them all. She smiled at the world and she smiled at Tom even as she watched him corrupt her expensive indolent existence. 

She knew when she married Abraxas Malfoy she married the name, not the man, and now she would protect that name, for her husband, for her son, for herself.

**Author's Note:**

> I need to find a way to lessen my obsession with Abraxas Malfoy.


End file.
